


Half Past Never

by josephina_x



Series: The Secret Origin of Warrior Angel, Issue #0 [1]
Category: Smallville
Genre: (remember when they were so young and cute?), (they are though), (yeah me neither :-P ), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Old School
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-01
Updated: 2017-02-01
Packaged: 2018-09-21 06:37:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9536201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephina_x/pseuds/josephina_x
Summary: We do remember how Clark reacted to his new situation when he lost his abilities, right? You know, after he realized what had actually happened with Eric, but before everything went downhill when he found out exactly what Eric was planning on doing with them?...like how happy he was to play that game of basketball and try his best andlose?Hanging out with Lana while she was still wearing her necklace? All of that?It’s just too bad that Eric wasn’t a very responsible guy, wasn’t it? Imagine what would happen if somebody whowasreally responsible got ahold of them -- maybe not even a teenager, who would need supportive parents on top of everything else, maybe an actual full-grown adult -- why, that might change just about everything…...wouldn’t it?:)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title: Half Past Never  
> Author: [josephina_x](http://josephina-x.livejournal.com)  
> Fandom: Smallville  
> Pairing: Clark + Lex  
> Rating: PG  
> Spoilers: general for early seasons; takes place during late season 1, references Craving 1x07, Jitters 1x08, and Leech 1x12  
> Word count: 16,000+  
> Summary: We do remember how Clark reacted to his new situation when he lost his abilities, right? You know, after he realized what had actually happened with Eric, but before everything went downhill when he found out exactly what Eric was planning on doing with them? 
> 
> ...like how happy he was to play that game of basketball and try his best and _lose?_ Hanging out with Lana while she was still wearing her necklace? All of that? 
> 
> It’s just too bad that Eric wasn’t a very responsible guy, wasn’t it? Imagine what would happen if somebody who _was_ really responsible got ahold of them -- maybe not even a teenager, who would need supportive parents on top of everything else, maybe an actual full-grown adult -- why, that might change just about everything… 
> 
> ...wouldn’t it? 
> 
> :)  
> Warnings: Un-beta'd.  
> Disclaimer: Not mine, not-for-profit.  
> Comments: Yes, please! :)  
> Author's Note: Yeah, yeah, I know this one has OOC problems (...the least of which being Jonathan running around with a _rifle in the back of his truck_ , beyond the one "in storage" behind the wood-trim/wall above the entryway to the farmhouse kitchen), but just go with it, I guess? (Or maybe pretend it was a baseball bat instead, for at least that plot problem? I dunno.)
> 
>  
> 
> _**2017-01-31:** Okay, this has been sitting around for **waaaaay** too long on my Google Drive account gathering dust (--I started this in October 2013!!), and while I could write a lot more to go with it -- which would take me I-don’t-even-know how much longer, let’s not go there right now -- I could **instead** finish up chapter 7 and consider it fit-to-post. Which is what I ~~am going to do~~ now have done. ...No, I’m not posting this one as a WIP; this is gonna be a series, instead. Maybe me having more ‘series’ and less ‘WIP’s will help save what little is left of my sanity in the process… eventually. Maybe. ...We’ll see? ^_^;;_

~*~*~*~*~*~

"What are you doing, Lex?"

Lex slowed to a stop and bent over, panting, with his hands on his knees.

He shook his head slightly at Clark as he regulated his breathing.

"You're jogging around Smallville?" he was asked, as Clark caught up to him.

Lex glanced up and past Clark to see the Kent's old battered pickup truck stopped a few yards ahead of him on the otherwise empty roadway. Clark had pulled over, likely on his way back to the farm, having spotted him during one of his produce delivery runs, Lex supposed.

It had been a very unexpected surprise.

Lex gave him a slight smile and straightened. "What can I say?" he said, sounding slightly breathless. "I felt like running instead of driving for once."

"You want a ride back?" his young friend asked him.

Lex shook his head and gave him another smile, one a little more wry. "Thank you, but no. I think I could use the exercise, after sitting around the factory all day."

"You sure?"

Lex nodded.

Clark gave him an odd look, but turned around and headed back to the truck.

Lex did the normal things one would be expected to do cooling off after a fairly long run in order to avoid injury or cramping -- he didn't stay still for long, he started pacing back and forth slightly, and he massaged his lower back and calf muscles at short intervals.

Clark finally got back in his parents’ truck and drove off around the bend.

Lex heaved a soft sigh and glanced about him, straightening and relaxing, his breathing pattern immediately returning to his usual calm intake.

He stepped off of the roadway and back into the woods, walking until he was once again out of view.

He again recalled what Clark's face had looked like when he'd first walked up to Lex, and winced slightly.

_I suppose I did overdo it a little,_ Lex thought to himself ruefully as he easily avoided the underbrush, moving farther and farther into the forest. He'd run treadmills for a doctor from the local hospital early-on when he'd first come to Smallville, after he'd heard about the meteor mutations and the higher-than-usual white blood cell counts. He'd run on that thing for a good thirty minutes at the highest speed, hit a good pace, and hadn't even broken a sweat, hadn't felt even the slightest loss of breath.

_And that had been **before**..._

His friend had seen him exercise once or twice before today, so maybe Clark had subconsciously noticed his try at 'breathlessness' as being somewhat unusual behavior on his part.

...Oops?

_Well, I suppose I'll have to work on that,_ Lex thought. Being normal was difficult. He didn't really want to have to do it very often, if ever, but if he _did_ ever need to slip away and hide himself in a crowd, to ever disguise himself and not stand out like a Luthor in a flock of sheep, well...

It would be a good skill to have.

_Especially since..._

Lex glanced around him one more time, as if anyone could see him with that much tree cover between him and the road, then pulled out his map of the state of Kansas. Now that he knew where he was again from recognizing the roadway...

He unfolded it and checked directions. Nope, nothing that way for at least twelve miles.

He neatly folded the map back up, stuck it back in his back pocket, and reoriented himself.

Then he bent over in a runner's crouch, fingers splayed out against the dirt.

He tipped his knees downwards, heels up, got a wide grin, and pushed off, trying to beat his newest top speed.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Well, no luck there. Clark wasn’t sure who'd gotten zapped with him this time, but it hadn't been Eric -- still safely locked away in Belle Reeve -- and whoever it _had_ been must not have been somebody familiar, after all. Stupid meteor rock and those stupid corrugated metal floors in that stupid old Level 3 in that stupid LuthorCorp factory.

It definitely hadn't been Chloe snooping around in the dead of night there, he was sure about that. But he could've sworn that it'd been Lex, sneaking up cautiously to crouch over him after he'd collapsed on that catwalk, having found a way to break in again. But the light had been behind him and Clark's vision had already been dark and blurry from the pain of being too close to way too much meteor rock that he hadn't been expecting to find. Then the overhead lights had shorted out and the electricity had coursed through the floor and...

"Did you find anything out, Clark?" his mom asked him with no small worry for him as he walked in the door.

Well, he could've sworn that it had been Lex. But...

Clark shook his head.

"It's weird," Clark muttered as he dropped down onto a chair at the kitchen table in front of his folks. "If he _did_ get my powers... well, I think maybe they're making him _weaker_ , somehow."

His dad gave him an odd look, then exchanged glances with his mom.

"What do you mean, son?" his dad asked him, looking concerned.

So Clark looked up at his parents and proceeded to explain.

~*~*~*~*~*~

"Lex!" he heard after having just finished his shower. He was still toweling off his head, while casually walking into his library after giving his security staff the night off. The better to play around without getting caught with... er...

"Clark?" he said turning and acting surprised. Not that he wasn't actually surprised at the unannounced entrance -- he was. Even though Clark had been doing that a lot more than usual, lately.

"Are you normal?" he was asked, and Lex felt his heart skip a beat. The jig was up!

"Ah..." Lex began, but Clark just looked annoyed and paced away, running his hands through his hair.

"I mean, I know you're not, but-- there's normal, and there's _normal_ -normal, right?" Clark continued, and Lex started to relax. "Because there's _Smallville_ -normal," and Lex tensed up again, "and then there's _everybody-else_ -normal," Lex began to relax again, "and apparently everybody-else-normal will get you caught in Smallville 'cause that's mostly weird to see," and Lex stifled a flinch and forced his expression smooth as Clark turned to face him dead-on. "Which is what I think you were doing today, with the whole jogging thing."

Lex stared Clark right in the eye and tried to look attentive, without giving anything away.

"Because you're not like Chloe, who moved here after the meteor shower, you're like everybody else," Clark added, crossing his arms over his chest and holding Lex's gaze.

"...I _did_ move here after the meteor shower," Lex said slowly, but his teenaged friend gave him an eyeroll.

"You **know** what I **mean** ," Clark said, sounding aggrieved as though Lex had personally offended him with that statement. "You were here during the meteor shower."

"This is true," Lex said conservatively.

"You were breathing hard after jogging," Clark pointed out doggedly, dropping his arms and starting to pace again. "You never do that after any exercise really," and that had Lex mentally cursing loud and long.

"Is this the part where I say 'metal fatigue'?" Lex asked with sarcastic glibness, then wished he'd just bit his tongue instead, because Clark whipped his head back around to face him and stared.

"-- _What?_ "

"Ah... nothing?" Drat. Lex hadn't meant to have that come out sounding like a question. Lying at the spur of the moment to his best friend was hard. Who knew?

Clark's eyes narrowed and he stomped towards Lex to come to a stop right in front of him, hands on his hips, staring him down.

Ah, yes. _Clark_ knew. Of course.

Lex smiled up at him guilelessly.

Clark's eyes narrowed a little bit more, to something approaching a glare.

"I'm not fooling anyone, I know," said Lex.

And now it _was_ a full-on glare. Joy.

Lex started to slide his hands into his pockets, then thought the better of it. He raised his hands, grabbed the ends of the towel lying around his neck, and then flicked it upwards over his head and also over Clark's.

He slipped it down to settle around the back of Clark's neck and let go, leaving it there. He turned and walked away, leaving Clark to deal with removing the somewhat-damp towel from about his own shoulders with no small confusion.

"So you admit it," Clark said accusingly, as he efficiently spread out and draped the towel over the back of the nearest black leather couch, presumably to dry, and straightened again.

"Admit what?" said Lex, bending down to open up his mini-frigidaire.

"That you--"

Lex selected a bottle of 'mud' water, as Clark liked to call it, and removed the cap.

Clark stopped talking.

Lex pulled a draught from the bottle, then turned back to him, adopting a look of calm waiting and serene and infinite patience.

"That... That you--" Clark repeated, then his brow furrowed and he stopped again.

Clark looked stuck. Very, very stuck.

Lex started to grin.

Clark glowered at him and looked away, crossing his arms in front of himself almost defensively.

" _...I don't know what you mean_ ," Lex told him very, very slowly, still grinning widely, and took another drink.

Clark stood there and looked frustrated as all get out.

"Was there something you wanted to tell me?" Lex asked politely, all-smiles.

Clark showed himself out.

~*~*~*~*~*~


	2. Chapter 2

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex woke up and

_THUD!!_

...crashed.

Not right away, mind you -- there had been a good several second delay in-between there that had had Lex wondering a bit about his sanity all over again.

Lex took a few moments to lie face-down in bed, breathing uncomfortably into the mattress, before deciding to try and tackle this one head-on.

_Let's review,_ he thought, as he rolled himself over to stare up at the ceiling blankly. _I was dreaming that I was floating._

A not-uncommon occurrence for him, post-Smallvillian car-crash.

_I suffered a brief period of transitory time during which I was neither entirely asleep nor entirely awake._

Also perfectly normal for him.

_Then I was awake for a good four breaths of subjective time..._

Nothing inherently odd there.

_...during which I felt like I was floating at least three feet above my mattress..._

Not so normal.

_...before I realized that I was, in fact, floating something like three feet above my mattress._

**Very** not so normal.

_Shortly after reaching said point of mental clarity, gravity suddenly seemed to finally decide to promptly reassert itself upon my person._

Which, granted, would have been normal on its own if he'd been falling _out_ of bed, instead of falling _into_ it.

But he _had_ been falling into it.

So what did that mean?

_I can... float...?_

...

Oh.

_**OH!** _

_\--Wait, wait. Let's not get ahead of ourselves..._

Lex scrambled upright to a cross-legged position and let his hands lie loosely on his knees.

He closed his eyes.

He concentrated on the feeling of floating. What he remembered from just a few seconds ago when he'd been... ... after the crash, but before...

He took in a deep breath.

He waited.

He concentrated.

He waited.

...

He more or less gave up, letting go of the feeling and opening his eyes.

There was a wide expanse of white plaster right in front of his nose.

Wh--

Was that the _ceiling_...?

_\--Aack!_

Lex scrambled to regain the floating-feeling as he flailed his arms outwards, futile with nothing physical within reach -- _shit!_ \-- staring wide-eyed as the walls rushed by on the way down.

He managed to grab onto that feeling for a second, tilted wildly in mid-air--

Then lost it again.

\--woosh--

thud--kerthumpbump _CRASH!!_

...

... _This_ time Lex ended up on the floor.

~*~*~*~*~*~

After seventeen minutes of further messing about, various successes and failures, almost putting his head through the ceiling twice, and accidentally breaking more than one piece of bedroom furniture in the process, Lex had determined that (1) yes, he could float with his eyes closed or open, and (2) he was very likely impervious to any significant physical harm.

And if he could float...

...he could probably fly.

...

...

_**Woohoo!** _

~*~*~*~*~*~


	3. Chapter 3

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex was putting safety first.

He waited until nightfall so no one would see -- who looked up out in the middle of the country? Even on a full moon night? 

Then he surreptitiously swiped an emergency BASE jumping parachute from the helicopter supply-shed, donned it carefully, slowly took off from the roof of the mansion, straight-up, and made sure he was at least 500 feet up when doing his faster maneuvers. He needed to be that high to allow himself enough time to pull the parachute and still have it open completely, so that it could slow him down enough so that he'd land safely even if his newly-discovered invulnerability gave out on him. Just in case.

\--And he'd thought he'd been 'flying low' on his cross-country runs!

It was a good thing that there weren't any insects this far up -- Lex would have plastered them all across his very wide grin. (And then spent an undue amount of time spitting and hacking and coughing them up while being completely grossed out.)

Anytime he thought he was feeling a little dizzy, or sick, he just closed his eyes and thought of his first experience floating over Smallville, and everything just evened out. No fear.

After none too long, Lex honestly couldn't remember why he'd been so afraid of heights.

...at least up until he was ready to land and stared past his feet down at the ground. **Then** he remembered, and to the tune of:

_Oh, hell. I'm rather far up, aren't I?_

Lex swallowed hard as he was rather forcefully reminded of the fact that it wasn't a fear of _heights_ that he had, so much as a fear of _falling_.

And he was going to have to be dropping down at the ground on purpose, at likely a very high rate of speed, if he didn't want to be up here all night.

...

...

Lex ended up pulling the parachute cord.

~*~*~*~*~*~

He told himself later that it had been the smart thing to do, letting gravity take over, since he trusted the parachute a great deal more than his own new abilities. He'd only just begun to test them out, and he'd begun to feel a little tired -- what if his new abilities had given out within the unsafe range of parachute deployment?

Besides, even if his abilities didn't give out to fatigue, there was next to no chance that he'd have been able to think straight while dropping downwards _faster_ than gravity could pull him -- not his first time out -- and Lex already knew from earlier that morning that he couldn't float when he couldn't concentrate properly. His flight ability would have just given out on him from the mental stress instead.

It had been the safe, logical, and smart decision to make on his first time testing his limits -- the limits of his newfound abilities.

...But he knew not-so-deep-down that he'd really just chickened out.

~*~*~*~*~*~


	4. Chapter 4

~*~*~*~*~*~

_ow-ow-ow-ow-ow!_

_...what the heck just happened?_ Lex thought woozily. Oooh, and he felt sick to his stomach, too.

It couldn't have been the parachute-fall; he'd been on the ground for a good while after that already, hadn't he? He vaguely remembered landing...

His brain reeled like a drunken sailor with a _godawful_ hangover for another few long moments, before it finally spat back what he'd had trouble remembering.

...and then he really began to wonder if he'd had some sort of psychotic break, or something along those lines, because suddenly gaining strange abilities beyond the pale out of the blue after being electrocuted was one thing, already seen at least once before in town...

_...but Clark's parents ambushing me with guns and rocks shortly after I hit the ground on my own estate?_ That was another thing entirely.

_Then again..._

...maybe he had it all wrong. Maybe he'd started hallucinating even farther back still, right after he'd hit and gone through that guard rail on the bridge? _If I'm actually in a coma, still in the hospital, from that..._ well, that would make a lot more sense.

The only sticking point was that he wasn't entirely sure his brain was creative enough to come up with a town full of meteor freaks all on its own. Sure, maybe he could imagine himself with superpowers -- that had been a regular fantasy of his when he was younger. But thinking up somebody like Clark? He never would've thought that anybody like Clark could ever have possibly existed, not even in his wildest dreams.

Lex grimaced and painfully rolled over onto his right side, closing his eyes and turning his face further into the dirt floor. _I wonder what that really says about me..._

Then he felt a vague startlement as he realized that the dizzy sensation he'd been feeling had suddenly lessened significantly. _What...?_

He turned back over and kept turning... then gritted his teeth and barely managed to roll back over the other way again.

He was panting by the time he'd managed to squirm and inch himself away to the right, and then roll over a few more times, regardless of the extra dirt his clothing was gaining from it. He slowly shoved himself up against the packed dirt wall, feeling much better -- comparatively, at any rate -- and stared around at the semicircle of meteor rocks surrounding him like a barrier.

A very effective barrier. He'd barely been able to move, once he'd gotten too close. It had literally felt like his life had been draining out of him.

If he'd been Japanese and inclined to believing in mysticism and bad anime plot devices, he'd have sworn that the rocks had been sapping his _chi_ \-- his vital life energy -- straight out of his skin through his chakra points. Being American, if he hadn't known any better from glancing down around himself at the otherwise clean and dry dirt floor, he'd have sworn up and down that he must have been bleeding out of every pore in his skin all across the floor with poison shot through his veins up until a few seconds ago. But, being a good citizen of the town of Smallville...

...Well, he really didn't know _what_ to think, actually, except that the radiation that those rocks gave off _really_ wasn't all that healthy for humans _at all_. And whoever had been working at the EPA following the meteor shower, who had signed off on the documentation that sat in utter denial of the effects, must have been bribed or otherwise blackmailed into saying otherwise and ought to be sued.

It made a kind of odd sense, really. First exposure didn't usually harm people, unless it had come in a supremely large overexposure to the rocks and radiation. The vast majority of the townspeople were actually healthier for their limited exposure to the stuff.

No, it was the _second_ large dose that got you. The **over** dose.

And he'd seen it over and over again in town already. Kid or adult gets dosed with meteor rock for the second time. Mutation happens. Things start to get out of control. Higher dosage after that? _Things get even worse._

Jodi Melville and Earl Jenkins were prime examples of that. They'd started out alright, but -- as Lex had found out later after his own research into their situations -- the more exposure they'd had to the meteor rock, the worse things had gotten. Hell, for Jodi, it had even been beneficial at first. If she'd just stopped drinking the stuff after the original diet ‘shake she'd made containing the first, larger dose...

Eric Summers hadn't started off all that differently, either. But it had seemed as though the more he'd used his powers, the more unstable he'd become...

Lex blinked down at himself. _No, that couldn't be right, could it?_ Where had that thought come from? Lex knew full well that it hadn't been the extended use of his newfound abilities that had had Eric starting to go over the edge and needing to be locked away in Belle Reeve along with the rest. It had been the teenage angst, the bullying, and the lack of support from his parents -- especially his father.

...Right. And Lex didn't have any of _those_ three things in spades himself, oh no, not at all...

Lex swallowed. Hard.

He tilted his head back to rest against the dirt wall behind his back, though there wasn't much to look at of the Kent's cellar ceiling.

He frowned to himself, because it wasn't really fair. He hadn't really _done_ anything with his powers yet, let alone done anything _wrong_. What gave Clark's parents the right to just go off and club him over the head like that and carry him off? Who did they think they were, anyway? Who died and made _them_ the powers-patrol?

...Actually, that'd make an almost sick kind of sense, if they were. Because it'd make a lot more sense why Clark was always involved in such matters in town, if it was a family thing. Clark was always in the thick of things with the teenagers in town; maybe his parents were the ones that took on the adults?

And Lex was an adult, after all. Technically.

Lex squirmed in place slightly and grimaced as he brought his chin down and looked at the chains wrapped loosely around his wrists. He lifted a hand experimentally, then let it drop. They felt heavy. Upon closer inspection, carefully turning his arms this way and that in his lap, Lex found the ends of the chains, which looked to be padlocked together.

And they might have felt loose on his arms -- in the sense that they weren't digging into his skin like most kidnappers seemed to prefer to do to him -- but he found from carefully twisting his forearms and wrists that he couldn't just slip out of them, either.

Lex sighed. _Well, at least they didn't tie me down to anything._ He wasn't exactly feeling _well_ at the moment, but he was feeling much better having been able to move away from the rocks a bit. He doubted he'd be feeling any better, though, if he'd been staked down to the floor spread-eagled at his wrists and feet, instead. Nor would he, if he'd still been laid out where he'd woken up before.

Lex twisted in place, then glanced down for a moment -- ugh, where were his socks and shoes? -- and dug his bare feet into the floor a bit and pushed.

He forced himself up a little straighter in place where he was sitting, and his shoulders rubbed into the wall behind him, letting loose a few small clumps of dirt.

...from the dirt wall. The _soft_ dirt wall.

_...Well, soft might be relative,_ Lex amended, as he tested it with his fingers and grimaced. He pulled his feet up and shifted in place, to lean sideways up against the lightly-crumbling surface.

Then he took as firm a hold of the chains about his wrists as he could and started scraping _those_ helpfully-provided hard metallic bonds against the earthen wall.

It took time and almost more energy than he had to build up even a small pile of the dirt, and he had to stop and rest often.

But after a while, he thought of something besides just digging, and picked up a fistful of the dirt in one hand.

And tossed it towards the nearest meteor rock.

He missed the first time. The spray didn't quite cover it the second. The third fistful got a little closer and did leave a slight covering pile in-between him and it...

...and Lex gulped in a breath and straightened, then slumped slightly against the wall in partial relief, feeling the partial reduction in ill-effect almost immediately.

He sat there for awhile, just breathing and thinking, then got a slow smile.

He glanced down and sideways, eyeing the meteor rock next to it, gave it a hard grimace-grin, and reached for another handful of dirt.

Things progressed much more quickly after that.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Soon enough, Lex had a veritable hole dug into the wall, up to about head-height with him sitting, one that went about a good three feet back, and nearly all the meteor rock on either side of him had been more-or-less buried in loose piles of thrown dirt.

Lex looked around and realized that, at this point now, he had a decision to make. He could keep on doing what he'd been doing -- digging and covering up the rocks. He could just keep digging and dig his way out, or he could dig for the purposes of gathering more dirt and cover the rest of the rocks, then walk out the usual way, or...

_What, explore what they've got crammed into the corners down here? Wait for them to come back?_ \--No, Lex was getting out of there.

And it probably wouldn't be a good idea to head for the cellar door. Lex had no idea if they'd booby-trapped any of the rest of the storm cellar, or if they might've set up a second line of rocks out and up by the entrance at the top of the stairs. It would be safer all around if he just kept digging, came up-and-out someplace unexpected.

So he did.

He shoved himself into the short shallow hole, and kept on going.

Soon enough, he was deep enough in and had a pile behind him that was high enough that, for all intents and purposes, he felt free of the effects of the meteor rock.

It still took him a bit to stop feeling quite so light-headed, but after awhile he was able to start digging with his fingers instead of the chains, and now it felt a little like digging through soft styrofoam. Or marshmallow fluff.

...Or cotton candy, and he had to stop for a second and peer down at his wrists when he _reached_ a bit farther than he probably should have tried to, and heard more than felt a grating metallic squeal.

He fingered over the chains on his right wrist with his left hand, then curled his fingers and tugged experimentally.

Then pulled.

The hard metal links _stretched_ , almost like saltwater taffy, then came apart and fell to the ground in front of him.

Lex blinked down at this, then decided to take advantage of this oddity while he could, and ended up removing the rest of the chains still wound around his arms before he ran out of the ability to do so.

He flexed his fingers.

_Huh,_ he realized. He hadn't equated the quasi-invulnerability he'd noticed earlier with increased overall strength, when he'd been performing his bedroom-floating experiments and banged himself around without acquiring so much as a single bruise, but maybe he should have.

Especially since it had been hard, packed-down dirt that he'd been digging through with his fingers for the last however-many minutes -- and to no ill-effect on his fingers or fingernails, it seemed, as he flexed his hands again and checked them.

So... increased speed that let him run fast and long and hard without stopping. --Higher endurance, too, to go along with it, in retrospect. Floating-flight, that he could nominally control and have him moving even faster through the air than over land on foot. Invulnerability to damage and pain... well, near-invulnerability, except for when he was being exposed to those rocks, because his hands had been aching slightly earlier when he'd been using the chains, even if they weren't anymore now. Strength, because when he was somewhat invulnerable, it wasn't just damage that he seemed impervious to; he seemed to be much sturdier than his surroundings.

And maybe he still had a heightened immune system, or maybe it had gone into overdrive now, because his hands weren't aching anymore -- in fact, nothing was. He felt _good_. Really, really good. ...So, self-healing too?

At this point, Lex might've chalked up his newfound powers to super-healing, or a super-immunity, actually... except for the floating... Because what would be the next step better than an ability to fix self-injury, other than the prevention of that injury in the first place? Speed would require stronger bonds between the cells, internally and externally, so as not to rip himself apart moving at the higher g-forces. Strength and invulnerability could be linked to similar, with strength also requiring better oxygenation of blood and more efficient energy conversion to supply his muscles with the right nutrients to perform such acts, and better waste removal to take away the CO2 and other acidic by-products of the process before anaerobic processes would need to start taking place.

All of that possibly could have been explained away by a supercharging by electricity. Maybe his body had been able to convert the energy somehow, in the low-level presence of the meteor rock left in that area of the factory. Self-healing on overdrive, turned into enhanced speed, endurance, strength, and (near-)invulnerability -- that _worked_. That **made sense**.

...except for the floating.

Because floating? That just didn't _fit_.

What exactly had happened to him in Level 3, with Clark there on that metal grating right in front of him? He'd seen Clark stumble and fall, and he'd been worried about the stability of the place, given what had happened the last time they’d been down there. ...and their safety as well, once he'd heard the fast-approach of footsteps banging on metal flooring and realized that they hadn't been the only ones sneaking around down there, not alone.

He'd felt an electric shock run through them both, and when it had stopped and he’d been able to move and breathe again, he'd dragged Clark off to safety then played decoy and drawn off the others away from where he'd left him -- his father's goons, still securing the place for reasons unknown. But by the time that he'd gotten the armed security personnel following him away, then lost them and doubled-back again, Clark had been gone. Lex had been relieved to find out later that Clark had escaped on his own. If Lionel's security staff had caught him...

There were some things that Lex could do, but standing up to his father and winning? Right now, that just wasn't one of them.

Lex had to laugh at himself, quietly but sadly, at that. _I can't stand up to him,_ he thought hysterically, staring down at his free wrists under the dim, almost faint lighting, broken chains pooled down around his knees where he crouched. _I can do..._ all this...

But Lex was still deathly afraid of him.

There were chains, and then there were _chains_. And some chains, you just couldn't break.

Not like taffy under strain.

_Not without breaking something else..._

Something that was important. Something that Lex just couldn't afford to break.

Lex took in a short breath, and shook his head. He dropped his hands. He _really_ didn't have time for this sort of self-reflection and introspection right now. Who knew when Clark's parents might be back?

He really didn't want to think about whether Clark might know where he was and what Clark's parents had done to him right now. Let alone whether Clark approved...

Lex shook his head abruptly, then craned his neck and started digging upwards at a slant...

~*~*~*~*~*~


	5. Chapter 5

~*~*~*~*~*~

Well, he was finally out, _...and thank god that claustrophobia is not one of my issues,_ Lex thought, as he crawled the rest of the way out of the hole, then rolled over and stole a brief moment to just lay on his back and stare up at the slowly-lightening sky and breathe what was left of the fresh night air. Dawn was approaching.

Lex frowned slightly and began to sit up, then thought the better of it -- it was probably a good idea to keep his head down below the grassline while he could. So instead, he lay back down and rolled over onto his stomach, crossed his arms under his chin, and began to think.

He hadn't thought he'd spent so much time flying about in the middle of the night, but perhaps he had. He hadn't exactly been timing himself. Then Lex flinched.

He glanced down at his wrist and realized with a jolt that his watch was gone! _...No, not gone -- missing,_ he amended, stopping himself from acting long enough to remember he hadn't been wearing it when he'd regained consciousness, before the panicked realization had him trying to dig back down through the hole he'd just exited, frantically looking for it amongst all the loose dirt -- it already hadn't been on him earlier, when he'd been looking over his wrists at the chains the Kents had presumably put on him. ( _Presumably_ , as he couldn't remember them chaining him up, but they _had_ been the ones to down him on the estate, and he _had_ woken up in their storm cellar, since he recognized their barn and house in the close distance. Given all that, Lex didn't doubt that his supposition was correct.) So they'd taken his mother's watch off of him, first.

He wanted it back. Along with his socks and shoes, if possible, but especially his watch.

He also wanted to know what the hell was going on, and if Clark knew about it.

He _didn't_ want to run into Clark's parents again, by any means.

Unfortunately, intelligence-gathering and watch-retrieval took precedence over caution.

So he carefully raised himself up to a crouch and scanned his surroundings.

...It looked like the lights in the farmhouse were on.

Lex crossed the distance in short sprints. He dashed forward, then crouched again. Then dashed forward and crouched.

Moving at super-speed when one wasn't at a flat-out run was harder than it sounded, especially in bare feet. Lex wasn't entirely sure that he was doing it right.

But, soon enough, he was crouched underneath a living room window, listening to the verbal altercation going on inside the house.

"I can't believe you did that!" he heard Clark complain. "How could you hurt him like that!" he continued accusingly, and Lex had to blink, because up until now he would have sworn that he was the only one who ever got that treatment. _Clark does that with his parents, too?_

"Son, he's a Luthor," he heard Mr. Kent reply firmly.

 _...when they're being patently unfair,_ Lex amended, and then he started frowning. He'd been right before -- the Kents did consider themselves the power police. _That_ was why they'd gone after him. --But they'd done it before he'd even considered doing anything wrong with them! _Because of course a Luthor couldn't possibly do anything **right** ,_ Lex thought angrily.

"Well, what did you stop him from doing?" Clark said, and Lex quietly choked at the injustice of it. _Nothing!_ Why had Clark immediately jumped to Lex being the villain all of a sudden? _What kind of a defense is this?!_ Lex seethed.

There was a long pause, and then he heard Mrs. Kent say, "Honey, he was... well," she trailed off, sounding uncertain.

"He was flying," Mr. Kent took over, stating it without inflection.

"He _WHAT?!?_ " Clark yelped.

"He was, we think," Mrs. Kent confirmed. "But..." There was a sigh. "Jonathan, Clark can't..." Mrs. Kent chided, but then there was another long pause. "...Clark?" as a sort of dawning realization hit. Then: " _Jonathan!_ " scolding.

Lex put a hand to his forehead and closed his eyes, his mind going a mile a minute now. Mrs. Kent hadn't known... what? That the other two had known about. But neither of them should have known about Lex being able to fly. Eric hadn't been able to, and he was the ‘freak with the closest similar powerset he could think of that was meteor rock based, presumably. _Clark couldn't... what?_

"--I can't!" Clark said in a rush. "I mean... I couldn't _before_. Except-- I mean, I _sort_ of could? But not. It wasn't really--! It was just--"

Lex slowly slid down the side of the house, staring out at nothing. _Clark could fly, except he couldn't._ Like Lex hadn't been able to fly, except that he'd kept trying at it? _Before._ \--Before **what?**

...Before _Lex_ could?

Lex lost track of the argument indoors as he counted things off on his fingers, because he'd made a tactical error somewhere -- or a logical one.

 _Speed._ To always be there when you needed him.

 _Strength._ Like enough to rip and bend metal.

 _Invulnerability._ So that getting hit by a moving car wasn't much of a hardship.

 _...nearly._ Just "nearly" enough that being around meteor rocks cancelled it out, and he could get hurt sometimes to throw a body off the right track.

 _Healing._ So that anything that did hurt him didn't have long-lasting aftereffects.

 _Flight?_ That he didn't really have control over, so it wasn't really on the map, yet.

He'd thought that he'd somehow ended up with powers _on-par_ with some of Clark's unmentionable tricks. He hadn't thought that he'd actually...

"--can't just let him run around with your abilities, Clark," Mr. Kent lectured him.

 _...stolen them._ Small wonder Clark had been so frustrated with him at the mansion! Lex had thought it had been tit-for-tat. He'd meant what he'd said as an 'I'll admit it if you do, too.' He hadn't realized that what he'd actually been doing to Clark when he’d said that, had amounted to outright _taunting_ him.

"You remember what happened to Eric," Mr. Kent continued in warning tones.

"Eric had a lot going on," Clark said, but the protest was muted.

"Do you really trust Luthor with them?" Mr. Kent pressed, adamant, and it was clear what the 'correct' answer to that was supposed to be.

Clark's silence was damning.

Lex dropped his head into his filthy, dirt-encrusted hands, oblivious to the grime. Yes, he'd been worried that Clark might've known what his parents had done. But he'd never actually thought...

"We can't just wait for him to hurt someone," Mr. Kent continued. "We did that with Eric, and look what happened. There's no way that Luthor--"

"He was flying," Clark said quietly.

There was a pause.

"...Son?" he heard Mr. Kent say in confusion, and Lex lifted his head up slowly.

"He was flying," he heard Clark say, with a quiet intensity Lex couldn't place. "I can't do that, not really. Eric couldn't."

"Son--" Mr. Kent started.

"He's using them better than I could."

There was an awkward silence.

"That just makes him that much more dangerous, son."

"Does it?" Clark protested, a little more loudly. "He'd have to figure out _how_ to use them all first."

There was another pause, which had Lex wondering what reference he'd missed, before it sounded like Clark's father started to put in another protest--

...and Clark cut him off again. "He was alone in the mansion yesterday afternoon, you know that? He sent everybody home before that flying stuff, right? He didn't want anybody to see."

"Clark--"

"He was being _responsible_ ," Clark stressed, and Lex heard a slight laugh.

"Martha!" Mr. Kent sounded scandalized.

"Well, he _was_ wearing a parachute," Mrs. Kent put out there, sounding almost faintly amused now.

"-- _See?!_ " Clark jumped on immediately. Then he said, sounding confused. "...Wait, then how do you know he was flying?"

"Well, we looked up," Mrs. Kent said. "He wasn't using it earlier, and he hadn't jumped out of a plane. Planes make noise, and they don't move around like what we saw." There was a pause, then a thoughtful, "Though we probably wouldn't have been able to see what he was doing any farther out, even from the road, if we'd been looking from there, instead."

"So he _was_ just trying to figure them out," Clark said, sounding relieved.

"Are you two listening to yourselves?" Mr. Kent sounded off. "This is Lex Luthor we're talking about!" he said stormily. "Once he's gotten them under control, he'll probably use them to--"

"--get the paperwork for the factory done faster?" Clark said, in a tone of voice Lex didn't recognize. There was a sound Lex couldn't quite make out, before Clark added, "Well, what did _I_ usually use them for?" which sounded somewhat rhetorical.

Though it did leave Lex wondering -- what _did_ Clark usually use them for? Besides saving people?

 _...Oh god,_ Lex realized with a slowly-growing horror, as he mentally listed off Clark's ex-abilities again, this time along with a superset of Clark's personality traits, and he sat down on the ground hard. _Oh god, I just stole a real-life Warrior Angel's superpowers._

Oh, he was _so_ going to hell.

Then he shrank down in on himself as he further realized: _...Oh god, I don't want to be a Devilicus!!_ Because stealing a Warrior Angel's superpowers would be a very Devilicus thing to do, and he didn't want that!

...But he didn't exactly want to give them up, either.

But he _also_ didn't want to get _bludgeoned with rocks_ by said real-life Warrior Angel's **parents** if he didn't give them back!

Lex shook himself. He could just run away if he saw them coming again, couldn't he? Now that he knew?

"It's not like he was _trying_ to steal them," he heard Clark continue. "It was just an accident, like what happened with Eric."

Oh _hell_. If meteor-freak powers could consistently get transferred by a particular sort of electric shock procedure...

Actually, Lex perked up at that, because if that were the case… then that would mean that there was probably a lot that could be done for the current set of ne'er-do-well's being incarcerated in Belle Reeve. If the powers were half of what made the meteor freak psychotic, and teenaged hormones the rest, then transferring those powers away from those teens would probably fix…

Though that directly led to the question of: who would get those powers, instead?

If Lex had been asked to pick someone as a candidate for something like that, he would have picked Clark, hands-down, even before knowing what he knew about Clark now -- because Clark was responsible, and stable, and certainly trustworthy enough to use or not use anyone’s meteor powers in any way but wisely.

But in a way, Mr. Kent was right: who in their right mind would trust _Lex Luthor_ with superpowers?

"And if he was trying to figure things out on his own without letting anybody else find out, he was being careful," Clark ended.

"Clark, if you think that he didn't turn right around and tell Lionel Luthor that he--"

Lex froze in place and forgot how to _breathe_.

"--No way," Clark said immediately. "He wouldn't do that!"

"Clark, he's his fath--"

"Lex doesn't trust him," Clark said adamantly, and it had Lex swallowing hard around a lump in his throat. "He's been jerking Lex around with the factory; Lex doesn't get along with him. He didn't even tell Lex about Level 3, which is probably why Lex was down there that night, sneaking around and trying to figure out what had been going on down there -- just like I was," Clark said. "Lex probably broke in, too."

"It's his factory, son," Mr. Kent started. "He wouldn't have to break in. And he knew full well--"

"No, he didn't!" Clark insisted. "You didn't see his face, when he and Mr. Jenkins made it to that hole I made in the wall, and looked in. Lionel didn't tell him. He didn't say a _thing_."

There was another long pause. "That doesn't make him trustworthy," Mr. Kent said finally. "And if even _Lionel Luthor_ doesn't trust him--"

"I don't care what Lionel thinks," Clark said rudely, cutting him off. "And we can't just leave him down there!" Lex heard Clark add, but his voice seemed to be moving away ...towards the front of the house?

"Clark, we were careful with the meteor rocks," he heard Mrs. Kent say soothingly. "He should be all right. He won't be able to get away--"

_If the dirt wall had been lined with them, too, I wouldn't have._

"--but he should be waking up soon," Mrs. Kent ended.

 _Too late,_ thought Lex.

"And in a really bad mood, I bet," Mr. Kent snorted.

_Well, if I wasn't **before**..._

"And whose fault is that?" Clark said, sounding angry. "You couldn't just ask him to come with?"

"You really think he would've said yes?" Mr. Kent said, sounding almost amused, and if Lex'd had hair it'd've been standing on end in fury.

Clark's response was some banging about, and the slamming of a door.

Lex became suddenly and _acutely_ aware that he was sitting along the side of the farmhouse -- out in plain sight -- and would be easily seen by Clark once Clark moved off of the porch.

He hesitated for a long second in indecision, then pushed himself up and made a mad dash across the yard to the barn, around the side of it, and behind it -- someplace where he'd be shielded from view.

He crouched down again and prayed that he hadn't been spotted.

With the way and direction he heard Clark continue moving off in, it sounded like he probably hadn't been.

...Unfortunately, Lex knew he couldn't stay where he was, there, either. He would be visible from the grassy area where the storm cellar was, where Clark was headed. --In fact, there wasn't much of _any_ sort of cover out there. The cow fields were here; the corn fields were _much_ farther off. He would either be visible from the house, or visible from the entrance to the storm cellar, wherever he tried to shield himself from view, using only the barn to block line-of-sight.

And he didn't want to leave just yet, because he still didn't have his watch back! Who knew what they’d done with it!

He started feeling a little antsy, as he carefully glanced around the edge of the barn down at ground level and saw Clark approaching the turning point.

Lex pulled back and looked all around. He could run off, maybe try to lose himself in the distant fields -- across the wide-open cow pastures he'd have to cross to get there -- and hope he was fast enough not to be seen. (Seen. Not _caught out_ , per se, because the Kents would find out that he'd escaped in short order, but there was a far cry between _that_ and them finding out that he'd been listening in on them for the last half-hour -- something he **definitely** didn't want them to know). Or, he could... what?

...The window to the barn loft was open.

Lex absently worried his lip.

He glanced to his left again, towards the tree line, then right, to where Clark was about to come into view.

_\--Ah, hell with it._

Lex jumped straight up.

~*~*~*~*~*~


	6. Chapter 6

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex blinked awake from under 'his' horse blanket. He'd decided to fall asleep up on the couch in Clark's 'Fortress' because (one) nobody ever went up there except Clark and his friends, (two) Clark's bookbag wasn't up there, which meant that Clark had no reason to come up there before leaving for school, thus he wouldn't be discovered up there, since nobody in their right mind would think Lex would stick around on the farm after having escaped after being kidnapped, and (three) even if the adult Kents did come inside the barn to work on chores during the course of the day, nobody would see him up there from below without actually coming up the stairs and looking around, and nobody would come up there when they knew Clark wasn't there because it was Clark's 'Fortress', and they wouldn't come looking for him up there either -- because why would Lex have stuck around? -- see previous reasoning.

Also, he was tired, and the Kents had been running around the farm all morning. He hadn't had a chance to sneak away.

The barn had had some horse blankets down in the stalls, so Lex had snuck down and scrubbed some of the dirt off of his face and arms and hands and feet down at the water spigot below, marched himself back upstairs, unfolded two of the blankets over Clark's couch so he wouldn't get the remaining dirt from his clothes on Clark's good furniture, and then snuggled up underneath a third because, frankly, he felt he could use the sleep after having been up almost all night.

But, after blinking awake, looking up, and recognizing that he was focusing on Mrs. Kent's face from below, Lex realized that at least one of his earlier assumptions might have been in error.

This realization was a little less dignified than Lex would have liked, however, because it involved tumbling off of the couch and scurrying away from her backwards on hands and knees and feet and hands again in a panicked flight reflex, back-back-back until _his_ back hit the barn wall below the window and he stopped.

Martha set down the tray she was holding on a table over to the side, and Lex quickly and carefully gave her the visual once-over, on the lookout for radioactive green crystalline rocks as he tried to calm his breathing back down, while she gave him the once-over in return.

"What--" Lex said, trying not to flinch away from her as she moved towards him... and mindfully sat down on the edge of the couch that was farthest away from where _he_ was sitting on the floor of the loft.

It didn't look like she'd done so because she was _afraid_ of him, either. --If anything, her lack of worry was setting all _his_ warning bells off.

"I noticed the absent blankets down below," he was told, and he had to stifle a grimace at his idiocy.

Mrs. Kent patted the blankets on the couch next to her.

Lex stared.

He slowly, hesitantly rose to his feet.

She watched and waited, until he finally started moving towards her, one cautious step at a time.

"You gave the boys a good runaround this morning," she informed him. "Clark was frantic."

"...Why?" Lex asked warily, as he gingerly settled down again at the very far end of the couch from her. He deliberately did not elaborate his query any further than that, not wanting to give away any of what he'd surreptitiously learned earlier that morning.

"Because he called around and nobody else had seen or heard from you yet this morning," Mrs. Kent explained, leaning back and looking perfectly at-ease, but the look she gave him... well, he wasn't sure what it was supposed to mean, but it made him feel very uncomfortable. He had to stifle the urge to squirm in place.

"It's not my fault you took my phone away," Lex told her, because among other prominent missing items that had been removed from his person, was the conspicuous absence of his cellphone. He would've called Gabe to let him know he was taking a day, if he had. (...Well, after he'd gotten free. Before that he probably would've called for help, if he'd had it on him and been able to think of someone to call who... _\--no, stop that!_ ) It didn't matter if she gave that back; he could get a new phone as he liked. What _mattered_ was -- "I want my watch back. And my _shoes_ ," he added, for good measure. His watch was irreplaceable; he’d crawl across a line of meteor rock to get that back. And he could get by without his socks if he had to, but he _needed_ his shoes.

Mrs. Kent smiled at him. "Really? That's what you want?"

Lex stared at her, because what else did she think he’d reasonably expect to get from them? Then he frowned at her when he realized what she might be getting at.

"...Well, I doubt I'm going to get an apology," he all-but-grumbled at her.

"Oh?"

 _Blast it all,_ he thought. _It's not like I don't deserve one!_ "--Your husband smacked me in the head with the butt of a rifle!" Lex reminded her crossly, folding his arms defensively. "And you stood there holding a bunch of meteor rocks and watched!"

"Well, Lex, I couldn't exactly stop him. I did have my hands full at the time," she said dryly.

"You could've done _something_ ," Lex groused, because if she'd dropped the rocks, he probably would've been just fine. "You're supposed to be the nice one," he muttered.

And, for some reason, this had Mrs. Kent laughing. "I thought you had dealings with Lana's aunt?" she asked him, with an open smile.

"...I do," Lex admitted, eyeing her.

"Hm. I thought she'd be the first to tell you that I'm not a very nice woman," Mrs. Kent told him kindly.

"...I thought she was just jealous," Lex said slowly. 'Boyfriend-stealing' tended to have that effect on women, or so he understood.

"Well, I'd certainly like to think so," said Mrs. Kent, with a twinkle of amusement in her eye. Her tone didn't exactly indicate that she thought Nell Potter was wrong in her assessment of her character, however.

And at that, Lex wisely, he thought, decided to let it go. While he didn’t exactly see the appeal of Jonathan Kent himself, he was certainly able to see that the two of them did think on the man well -- or at least well enough to fight over him, anyway.

Lex shifted uncomfortably under Mrs. Kent’s gaze for awhile, while she seemed perfectly content to wait for his next words patiently.

"...What do _you_ want?" Lex finally asked her, feeling even more disconcerted now than he had at waking up to her presence over his head. ...Which frankly shouldn't have been possible, now that he thought on it -- he _should_ have woken up long before that. He always did when any of the servants at home approached him. And the longer she took to pull meteor rock on him... ( _again_...) well, the less he knew what to do.

"I want to know what your intentions are with my family," Mrs. Kent asked of him, and that set Lex frowning.

"...I'm not certain I know how to answer that," Lex answered carefully, because, quite frankly, that was what _he_ wanted to know from _her_.

"Well, you didn't throw our truck at us through the side of the house this morning, so I'm assuming you're not homicidal," Mrs. Kent said blazely, and that had Lex paling.

"--What?" he blurted out, leaning away from her. _Where did **that** come from?!_ And why would he even--?

Mrs. Kent sighed, then looked away and rubbed two fingers at her right temple. "I know you were out there listening earlier," she told him. "I found your footprints in the dirt outside the living room window."

Lex couldn't completely stifle a wince.

"I'll admit, Jonathan and I didn't exactly handle things very well last night," Mrs. Kent said, dropping her hand in an expansive gesture, and she actually sounded apologetic. "But Jonathan hadn't exactly been clear with me about what he was planning on doing before we got over there…"

"The gun he was toting wasn't a really good indication of that?" Lex said thinly.

Mrs. Kent sighed in exasperation. "My husband wasn't going to _shoot_ you," she told him. "But given all the craziness that tends to go on around your grounds, I don't think he was exactly unjustified in grabbing a rifle out of the back of the truck and going in armed."

"It's my property," Lex pointed out, starting to get angry.

"And when we drove up to the front entrance, none of your usual security staff were at the gate _or_ patrolling the grounds," Mrs. Kent told him patiently. "We didn't see anyone at all; we thought something was wrong," and, yes, all right, Lex could grudgingly admit that maybe that might have looked a little bad.

"Clark should've noticed that nobody else was around earlier," Lex pointed out glumly, feeling a little like he was fighting a losing battle.

"Lex, there's a big difference between your house staff being dismissed for the day, and your security staff having gone missing, too. He didn't say anything about the latter."

Lex shifted in place. "I gave them the night off." He'd put in the dismissal for his overnight security staff earlier in the day and a little before he'd seen Clark, yes, but it was true none of the personnel had actually left the premises until about 7pm, when the first night shifts usually rotated in. Not that he'd have had any reason to tell Clark that, even if he'd asked.

"Well, we didn't know that," Mrs. Kent told him frankly.

"I don't see how it's any of your business what I tell my people to do or not do, anyway."

Mrs. Kent gave him another uncomfortable-feelings-inducing look.

"--You attacked me on my own property!" Lex shot back in response to her look, feeling somewhat threatened.

"It was dark out, and you dropped down right out of the sky on top of us," Mrs. Kent told him, firmly.

"There was a full moon!"

Mrs. Kent opened her mouth, likely to argue with him, then she stopped herself and let out a short breath.

And instead of whatever she'd been about to say, she instead said: "Well, it was that dark out for _us_."

Lex was about to tell her off, older woman deserving of his respect or no, when her tone of voice registered and made him stop, because it left him a little leery of giving her a direct and confrontational answer.

So instead he tried to parse the content a little more carefully, because the way she'd put it had been a little odd, too...

And then he blinked.

Because, if he had to compare last night to other nights in his experience, even ones during a full moon, for some reason it _had_ seemed almost unnaturally bright outside for the time of day.

"...My vision is better now, too?" Lex said quietly, trying to think that over. Because he _had_ dropped out of the sky rather abruptly from not too far up, and he hadn't really seen them as he'd been coming down. "I didn't see you. Where were you?" he asked. He'd been a little... distracted by things on the way down, like how fast he'd been dropping, and what little rational thought he had leftover to spare he'd quickly used up in frantically trying to maneuver the parachute so he'd come down properly. He hadn't realized anyone else was there until after he'd tried to stand up post-landing and gotten himself turned around, let alone who they'd been.

"We were over by the northwest corner of the mansion, close to the rose bushes on the far side. We saw something darting around overhead, then come down pretty quickly almost right at us."

 _Oh._ If they'd been at the corner of the building... he'd barely managed to skirt it on the way down. That _had_ been pretty close to them. And from only a few hundred feet up, it had only taken a few seconds to drop...

Lex shivered slightly. "...I suppose that would be little a bit startling," he had to admit, after thinking it through. And, full moon or not, with the distraction of a quickly-approaching ground, while they hadn't recognized him in the air, he hadn't seen them coming in, either. Though, once he was on the ground... "You really didn't recognize me?"

"Well, I can't speak for Jonathan," Mrs. Kent said in an oddly-warm tone of voice, "but _I_ certainly didn't. Not at first."

Lex grimaced, then sighed and pulled his legs up in front of him, wrapping his arms around his knees and looking away.

"But you had the meteor rocks out already," Lex pointed out quietly, not wanting to look at her. She'd been prepared for the worst, and that had kind of hurt.

"I wouldn't have had much of a chance to get them out if I hadn't, and needed them," Mrs. Kent informed him. "And I think you should know that by now," she added quietly, referring no doubt to his newfound speed-related abilities.

Lex glanced down at the floor and didn't quite shrug.

"Lex..." she said. "I don't have any meteor rock on me right now, do I?"

"No," Lex said quietly, glancing her over. She was close enough to him that he'd be in pain if she was. He shifted in place. "You still tossed me down in your storm cellar." _Chained up. With the rocks all around._

"Jonathan was convinced that you'd been attacking us," Mrs. Kent said with no small exasperation. "Clark was already asleep upstairs by the time we got home again. I thought that we could settle things calmly like rational adults in the morning."

"You couldn't've woken him up?" Lex groused.

"It's a school night," Mrs. Kent told him succinctly, which told him what she thought of _that_ idea.

"So you were planning on leaving me down there to be irradiated overnight," Lex said slowly.

Mrs. Kent had the grace to frown at him. "We obviously didn't use enough on you to stop you from getting free."

"I was _highly_ motivated," Lex said quietly.

Mrs. Kent's eyebrows drew up, then down again even farther than before, after studying him intently.

"I _see_ ," she said. There was a long pause. "I may need to have a long talk with someone about some of the things they haven't been telling me," she said without inflection.

"...It might just be ...different for me," Lex offered, not wanting to get his best friend in trouble with his parents for... what, exactly? Not telling his mother how much the meteor rocks actually _hurt him?_

\--Would it really matter? Clark had been about to go down into the storm cellar -- no, _had_ gone down there, if he'd known for sure that Lex had escaped, because seeing the hole at the surface wouldn't be enough for that -- and Clark had gone in knowing full well that there were meteor rocks down there.

"Still, though," Mrs. Kent said.

Lex shook his head. "It's not as though we're the same person," Lex said, "I don't think that Clark meant to..." but he trailed off, frowning at the implications of Clark having gone down there that morning without hesitation. Did the meteor rocks really not affect Clark as badly as they did himself? Or did they just not affect him any _more_ , now that Lex had Clark's powers? Lex remembered Clark's reaction to Lana's necklace, and that lead box.

...Did that mean that the meteor rocks were a weakness? Did Lex have Clark's 'weaknesses' now, too, not just his strengths?

Lex glanced over Mrs. Kent and wondered how, exactly, she knew what the meteor rock would do to Clark (and now him), but without knowing how badly ill it made either of them. Yes, she'd likely not been able to tell from looking at Lex last night, in the dark and with him unconscious and unable to respond, but Clark...

Lex started when he realized that the only way that could be true for a perceptive woman like herself would be if she'd only ever _heard_ of such happening to Clark, never seen him exposed to it, never used it on him herself. ...Never needed to?

Lex lifted his eyes up to meet Mrs. Kent's gaze again, and started again, this time at her knowing look.

"You don't think that Clark meant to...?" She echoed his words lightly, almost a leading question. _Almost._

Lex stared at her, then swallowed, hard, as he realized that he'd let slip that he knew exactly where his newfound powers had come from -- or, rather, _from whom_. Martha's earlier comment could have been taken any number of ways, aimed at any number of nebulous individuals, but he himself wouldn't have said what he had, as he had, otherwise.

"Ah..." Lex leaned back into the side of the couch and found himself wondering if _now_ might be a really good time to jump back out of the window and make a run for it, far far away. ...It wasn't _that_ high of a fall, was it? He ought to be able to handle that... without a parachute, which wouldn't work anyway since they weren't quite _that_ far up. Such a comforting thought, that.

He tried not to startle again when Mrs. Kent abruptly stood up, and before he knew it, he had a tray full of... food... balanced on his knees.

He eyed her, then eyed the breakfast foodstuffs that Mrs. Kent had apparently brought up and left on the floor beside the couch earlier before waking him, as Mrs. Kent settled back down on the opposite side of the couch from him again.

"Go on," she said encouragingly. " _Clark_ wouldn't want you to half-starve yourself," she said with a tilted smile. "And after what happened last night, the least I can do is feed you."

Lex hesitated for just a moment more, until the aroma of it hit him. _And_ there was coffee, too.

Mrs. Kent was mannerly enough to wait to say anything more until after he'd finished eating, which didn't take him very long at all.

He sighed softly when he was done and sat back against the arm of the couch, then wondered why he had such an appetite in the first place. He didn't usually eat this much in the mornings, and by rights he should have felt full long before he'd finished. But he'd finished it all.

Feeling vaguely embarrassed, he tentatively handed the tray back over to Mrs. Kent, who placed it down on the floor for the moment, without leaving the couch.

"...Did you _have_ to put me in the storm cellar?" Lex asked again, after a somewhat long silence between them.

"We don't have a spare bed for the 'guest' room on the first floor right now," Mrs. Kent pointed out. Lex had to concur; he'd seen it on previous visits to the farm. It was more of a half-junk room, half-sewing room at the moment. "And if we'd brought you into the house, Clark would've woken up, or you would have, and we'd have had a mess on our hands," Mrs. Kent said.

"You _already_ had a mess on your hands," Lex pointed out, not wholly-unkindly. He still wasn't happy about it though. "You could've left me at the mansion, just carried me inside." It had to have been far more effort to cart him back to the truck, get him up inside it, drive home, and then drag him down into their storm cellar in chains, surely!

"It wasn't safe to leave you there," Mrs. Kent told him. "All your staff were gone. No-one else was there. --Even if we'd somehow known you had dismissed them, there was no-one guarding the premises," she said, holding a hand up as Lex was about to protest. "We didn't know what state you'd be in once you woke up, or when you'd wake up, or if anyone else might come by in the meantime who shouldn’t be there, and we couldn't risk staying there and leaving Clark home alone all night, waiting for you to wake up."

Lex wasn't sure if he felt more gratified, chagrined, or _wary_ of the fact that Mrs. Kent, all things being equal, would have stayed to watch over him overnight at the mansion, if Clark hadn't required her attention. ...He grudgingly settled on the latter, since they'd likely not have wanted to leave him alone due to a lack of trust, given the meteor rock trouncing and restriction he'd received instead. Had they _really_ had to stuff him in the blasted storm cellar, though?

"You could've put me up in the barn," Lex said, but at Mrs. Kent's almost-rueful smile, his thoughts shifted tracks and he straightened. "--You were hoping Clark wouldn't find out." Because under normal circumstances, Clark would have run into him if he'd been in the barn that morning. And Clark wasn't a rational adult; if she'd wanted to have all the **adults** having a rational conversation to settle things the next morning...

Well, it _had_ been pretty embarrassing all-around. For a start, Lex wouldn't have wanted Clark to find out that he'd been ambushed like that, and...

Mrs. Kent sighed and gave him a weary smile. "It was a misunderstanding," she told him, "and not exactly our finest hour."

 _No kidding._ Lex could hardly disagree.

"You _are_ all right, though, aren't you?" she asked, with a touch of worry, looking him in the eye carefully.

"I'm fine," Lex said with a grimace, waving it off. _Now, anyway._ "It could have been worse," he added, letting her off the hook. Her _husband_ , though...

"Would you really have rather we had left you lying there, unconscious on the ground, out in the open, after Jonathan overreacted?" Mrs. Kent asked him.

"...No." Lex would admit at least that much. Waking up on the cold, hard ground later would have sucked, and he would have wanted to talk to them. --Not that the cellar had been much better, though, considering. _Especially _not with meteor rocks in the mix.__

__"The basement of the house isn't any better than the storm cellar, and you think our living room couch is lumpy," Mrs Kent reminded him. Neither of them brought up the loft where he'd woken up just a little while earlier -- this was Clark's space, and he really wasn't supposed to be up there without him._ _

__Clark would have found him up here, too, if he hadn't been told where Lex was on the premises, which would have then required an explanation of some sort, and Clark's parents had been trying to avoid that entirely. Still..._ _

__"Chains and meteor rock with no explanation," Lex pointed out grumpily. Couldn't they have at least done him the courtesy of leaving him a note? _Something_ other than just waking up alone, and in pain, and not knowing what in the hell was going on?_ _

__"Do you have complete control over your strength, yet?" Mrs. Kent asked him._ _

__That left Lex more than a little taken aback, because he didn't have a clue how he should take that. He hadn't even really known he'd had such strength until just that morning, after what had happened with the chains. So what was he supposed to say, 'no, I haven't had any horrible, nightmare-inducing accidents yet'? Technically he'd already had an accident upon waking: the floating incident from the day before._ _

__"You know, you still haven't answered my original question, Lex," Mrs. Kent gently pestered him._ _

__Lex forced himself to drop the subject of possible strength issues for the moment and think back. "What my intentions are towards your family?" He grimaced slightly. "I... would rather like to avoid any further... _misunderstandings_ ," he remarked slowly. "And discuss sometime soon how I might be able to avoid any missteps on my part that would involve seeing more meteor rocks, gun butts, electrocution, or additional nights in your storm cellar in my immediate future."_ _

__Mrs. Kent smiled at him, then reached forward and patted him on the arm._ _

__"I think that that can be arranged," Mrs. Kent told him with something like amusement, which had Lex looking at her askance._ _

__...Because, given that electrocution seemed to be the method of choice for meteor-rock power-transfer, Lex really wasn't so sure about that._ _

__~*~*~*~*~*~_ _


	7. Chapter 7

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex had worked out a compromise with Mrs. Kent, or maybe it was more of a temporary truce. Whatever the proper designation, he was slumbering peacefully in Clark's room when he finally woke again to... well, he wasn't sure what.

He rolled over and pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket, wondering if that had been what had woken him up. ...No, there were no new voicemails, and the last message on there was from when he'd texted Gabe about his 'sick day' before he'd fallen asleep -- unsurprising, since informing Gabe of that was rather the point, to make it more than likely that no-one from work would disturb him in the interim. He slid the phone away and pushed up his sleeve to check the time -- Mrs. Kent had returned his watch, too, which was back around his wrist where it should be, and none the worse for wear.

It was 3:30pm. He let his arm drop back to the mattress, and debated getting out of bed -- probably -- and whether he should change clothes again before going downstairs, first -- he felt ambivalent about it at best. He’d already changed once earlier, not particularly caring that he would be sleeping in a clean set of his normal everyday wear, rather than sleepwear, which he’d left on Clark’s dresser to the side. The level of direness of wrinkly clothes was much lower on his list of improper comportment offenses than dirt-encrusted ones, as far as he was concerned. What had felt far more important at the time was that having his things on him meant that, worst come to worst, a quick escape would be possible without any detours -- no sidetracking necessary, he could just slip into his shoes and run.

Not that he’d needed to take such precautions, apparently.

His earlier truce with the Kent matriarch had gotten him inside and showered and a bit more food into him, while Mrs. Kent had somehow managed to get his staff to send over some clean clothes over from the mansion. He'd also gotten the rest of his things back, socks and shoes included, before he'd laid himself down again. The compromise part of it was that he'd stick around on the farm until they'd all had a talk.

And he was willing, if not exactly happy, to do so. He didn't much feel like moving at present, after all the 'excitement' in the last twenty-four hours, but what exactly had woken him up? He closed his eyes and concentrated on the sounds coming from the rest of the house.

"--But he's okay?" he heard Clark ask plaintively, for what was likely not the first time, given the infinite patience in Mrs. Kent's tone as she answered him in the affirmative. Lex scrubbed a hand over his face, sighed, and waited for Clark to push open the door to his room.

"He's still sleeping, though, so you shouldn't go upstairs," Lex heard Mrs. Kent add. He blinked his eyes open and glanced over to frown at the door in confusion.

He heard Clark grumble a bit, then footsteps and a door open and close, and that had Lex sitting up bolt-upright in bed.

_What in the world--?!_ Because he hadn't heard Clark descend the stairs, and now it sounded like Martha... was dealing with pots and pans? ...Cookware?

But he was upstairs. And they were... _downstairs!_

But how was that even remotely possible? He shouldn't have been able to hear them so clearly! They'd sounded like they'd been standing right outside Clark's bedroom door...

...or practically in the same room and just echoing through an open doorway, except Clark's door was closed.

Lex frowned. _Hearing?_ he thought, gently touching his ears, then he reflected on earlier that morning. Hell, he hadn't even noticed consciously noticed it before -- he'd heard them talking in the living room, but it had been as clear as if one of the windows had been open...

...except the window hadn't been open. And that morning, he'd been out and about in the cold, but he hadn't been shivering. It had felt cool, but nothing like the usual chill temperatures he should've been feeling. And along with his apparent night-vision... _Hearing, sight, touch._ Was there anything that _hadn't_ been affected? _\--What the hell, Clark?_ How far did this go?

Well, there was one way to find out: walk up to Clark and ask him.

Lex cautiously got up and took his time going down the stairs. Slowly. Silently. He glanced down the long hallway -- empty -- and stepped off the landing, so far so good. He poked his head into the living room, just the slightest bit, and looked across the house to see -- yes, as he'd surmised -- Mrs. Kent working in the kitchen. She was cleaning something in the sink, facing away from him. He pulled back and glanced over his left shoulder at the front door, the exit leading to (...relative...) safety and freedom.

He stepped forward, reached out a hand for the door knob, and...

"--Lex?" he heard Mrs. Kent call him.

He stopped, fought a grimace, and slowly turned. _Then again... maybe not._

Mrs. Kent was looking right at him, from down the hallway at the kitchen-side entrance, leaning around the corner. "Would you mind helping me with these green beans for the salad?"

She hadn't even brought up the fact that he'd been about to leave without talking with them.

...which would have been breaking his promise. Lex tried not to wince.

She also didn’t wait for him to reply, or even to start moving; she just walked right back into the kitchen, like she was expecting his compliance.

Lex took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. He started walking forward, and gingerly stepped out of the hallway and through the doorway into the kitchen, tensing slightly as he did so.

He didn't feel particularly irradiated standing there where he was, so there probably wasn't any meteor rock in here, either.

"I thought I heard Clark a little while ago," he put out there, just to see what she would say.

Mrs. Kent handed him the bowl she was holding, which contained -- sure enough, green beans. "He just came home from school. He's likely out in the barn," she told him. "Doing his homework." Her tone brooked no tolerance for interference from outsiders while Clark was putting time into his academic pursuits.

"Yes'm," Lex muttered, as he frowned down at the bowl. And drew a complete blank. "...What am I supposed to do with these, exactly?"

Mrs. Kent showed him, and walked him through several other tasks necessary for the preparation and cooking of the meal, as well. In less time than he would have expected, everything was on the table.

...Or, at least, it _felt_ like less time than he'd expected. When he glanced up at the clock on the wall, he realized that time had passed far more swiftly than he'd thought possible.

He looked up from setting the salad bowl down on the table at the bang of the screen door, to the side kitchen entrance, expecting to see Clark. Instead, he was greeted by the sight of one Jonathan Kent, looking more than a little stone-faced.

Lex froze.

Jonathan Kent went from zero to pissed off in less time than it took Lex to register his anger.

" **What the hell are you doing here, Luthor?!** " the man thundered out, stomping forward.

Lex flinched and backed the hell up, out of reach of him, and hopefully also any radiation sources he might have on him, as well.

Mrs. Kent took a half-step backwards, blocking her husband’s forward motion along the shortest direct-line path between her and her impromptu kitchen helper -- the kitchen counter side of the food-laden table. She reached out and slapped the flat of her hand against Jonathan Kent’s shoulder, holding it there.

Jonathan stopped short, startled by the icy, quelling look his wife was giving him, and glanced between them.

“Lex was up in Clark’s loft earlier,” she informed her husband. “I found him and had a chat with him, and he’s staying for dinner,” she told her husband matter-of-factly.

“Martha--”

“Dinner’s on the table. We are going to eat first, and then we are all going to sit down and discuss things _calmly_ like _rational, well-mannered people_ ,” Mrs Kent told her husband in no-nonsense tones. “Now go upstairs and wash up.”

Mr. Kent clenched his jaw and grumbled a little, but he turned and went upstairs without any further argument, and without even shooting Lex a dark look over his shoulder as he went.

Lex watched him go, then turned to Martha. “Can I trade superpowers with you?”

Martha gave out an almost-startled laugh, but when she looked over at him, her smile faded from pleasure, at what she’d thought had only been an offhand compliment, to something like real concern, when she realized that Lex had actually been dead serious about it.

“Honey, that’s not really a... superpower,” she told him with a tilted smile, lifting a hand towards his chin. She checked the motion before she touched him, though. “Here,” she said, moving away from the sink. “You wash up, too, and I’ll go get Clark for--”

“LEX!” he heard from the doorway, and he turned again -- _this_ time it was Clark standing there.

He didn’t really have more than a split-second to wonder if he should start to panic before Clark was in front of him and wrapping his arms around him.

“Oh, thank god,” Clark breathed out as he pulled Lex into a hug, murmuring something like ‘you’re really--’ into Lex shoulder, and Lex started to curl his arms around Clark in return, on reflex, in something like mirrored relief.

But then Lex remembered something Clark’s mother had said earlier and he froze stiffly in place.

“...Lex?” Clark said, starting with confusion, but then sliding into something like worry, and ending with just a touch of dread.

“Clark, let go,” Lex told him quietly.

Clark slowly started to pull away, but he didn’t let go completely. “Lex?” he asked softly, and when Lex looked into Clark’s eyes, he felt like he had just shot someone’s cute little puppy.

That hadn’t just been dread that he’d heard in Clark's voice; that had been spoken from a silent and deep wound, and there had been a touch of fear there as well. Fear of impending pain.

Lex swallowed. Now he didn’t **want** to touch Clark, not when Clark was looking at him like this. He dropped his eyes to Clark’s chest and slowly, smoothly, began to move his arms out and away from Clark’s sides. In a carefully neutral tone of voice, he said, “Clark, you need to let go...”

Clark grabbed onto him and, startled, Lex looked up again reflexively. And what Clark had had written across his face before had vanished, to be summarily replaced by a growing frown and a strong, steely determination instead.

“ _Why?_ ” Clark asked him, pulling himself almost full-flush up against him again, just to be contrary. “Why do I _need_ to let go, Lex?”

Lex tensed as he looked up into Clark’s eyes, startled again and now feeling more than a little off-balance. There was a hovering uncertainty there in Clark’s gaze, but... whatever Clark had been scared of, it apparently hadn’t been the same thing that Lex was afraid of, right now.

“You need to let go, because earlier I pulled apart a set of metal chains wrapped around my wrists as if they were _taffy_ ,” Lex told him quietly, “and I’m not sure that I can control--”

“--You mean my _mom’s_ not sure,” Clark interrupted, and Lex realized that not only had he glanced over at Clark’s mother briefly when he’d been talking, but that Clark had picked up on it, too.

Clark was looking at him with all kinds of sharp-eyed thoughtfulness going on now, and while Lex had seen brief glimpses of the brain hiding behind Clark’s eyes before, and the detail-minded focus Clark was in fact capable of, he’d never seen it for quite so long before, and certainly not all at one time. It was a little dizzying to be the focus of it, not _quite_ unnerving, but almost; he felt a little warm under his skin.

Lex took in a breath.

“Clark, I wasn’t even _aware_ that I was strong enough to be capable of bending metal before,” Lex told him. Well, not until he had done it -- and that in and of itself should have been enough cause for worry, but Clark was just standing there and shaking his head at him.

Clark pulled away abruptly, making Lex feel suddenly alone, bereft and _unwanted_ for a moment -- and how stupid was _he_ for feeling like _that_ \-- except that Clark didn’t actually let go of him. Clark slid his hands over Lex’s shoulders, down his arms, to his wrists, and folded his hands over Lex’s own, moving them together into an almost prayer-like gesture, palm-to-palm.

Lex glanced down, then up again as Clark did it, the motion of Clark’s hands seeming odd, his touch very... close. Closer than he was usually used to receiving from Clark, certainly -- not intimate, but almost personal.

Clark held Lex’s hands together, and he _smiled_ down at Lex with those sharp, knowing eyes, like he’d just confirmed something he’d already suspected.

“Clark?”

Clark transferred his hold around Lex’s hands from two hands to one, and with his now-free hand he reached over and plucked an empty drinking glass up off of the kitchen table. “Close your eyes,” he told Lex, and Lex had no idea--

“Clark, what are you--” 

“It’s okay, Lex. Just close your eyes.”

Lex took in a breath and let it out slowly. He glanced between Clark and his mother, then back at Clark again. They couldn’t be trying to catch him off-guard, could they? --If Clark was going to hurt him, wouldn’t he have done it already? Wouldn’t Mrs. Kent?

...Lex closed his eyes.

The hand holding his own loosened and dropped under Lex’s still-clasped hands. Following the prompt, and getting a better idea of what Clark wanted -- though still not _why_ \-- Lex opened and cupped his hands, waiting.

Clark set the glass in his cupped hands, and Lex curled his fingers around it as Clark let go, holding it.

Then he felt Clark’s hands encircle his own and suddenly _push_.

Lex resisted the motion and blinked his eyes open to frown up at Clark, who was staring him right in the face, watching him.

Lex opened his mouth to question him -- what _was_ he doing? -- but Clark just nodded once, like he’d expected that, too. He didn’t tell Lex to close his eyes again, he just looked down and busily resituated Lex’s hands around the glass -- one hand holding it, the other curling pointer and index fingers over the inside rim of the glass.

“Okay,” Clark told him, raising his gaze to his again. “Now pull.”

“What?” Lex said, startled. He glanced down at it, then back up again. Clark wanted him to…?

“Clark,” his mother said.

“It’s okay,” Clark said, glancing over at her. He turned back to Lex and nodded at him. “Go ahead.”

Lex glanced between them, feeling a bit torn. But Martha didn’t contradict her son. So Lex looked down at the glass, then tugged at it tentatively, without putting much pressure into it.

Clark got a slight smile, but it went away just as quickly as he zeroed out this expression into pure attentive seriousness again.

“No, Lex,” Clark told him. “Break it,” Clark said, looking into his eyes.

“But--”

“It’s okay, Lex,” Clark told him, looking him straight in the eye as he did so. “Just break it. Please.”

Lex felt acutely uncomfortable at the thought of doing so -- it was perfectly good glassware, and he doubted Mr. Kent would let him replace it.

He looked over at Mrs. Kent again, but she was only looking at them both with a light frown. She didn’t look mad; she was just watching them, thinking. And when she saw him look to her, she hesitated for only a moment, then nodded at him once, firmly. She wanted him to do what Clark had said.

So he took in another breath, and he did as Clark asked: he drew his palm back slightly, bracing his thumb against the outside of the glass, then slid his fingers farther inside the rim. And he tugged, a quick jerk of motion.

The glass cracked, of course; a piece about as big as the base of his thumb snapped away in his hand. It was effortless -- almost scarily-so. He couldn’t help but wince as a few of the smaller splinters got away from him, slid down the sides of the glass and hit the linoleum floor around them; it hadn’t broken cleanly. Lex stifled both a sigh and a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“Clark, I _told_ you,” Lex said, as he squatted down briefly to retrieve those stray splinters and set them inside the glass. Clark squatted down to help; it didn’t take but a moment. “I--” He glanced up at Clark as they both rose up again, and was startled all over again.

Clark was smiling in _approval_ , of all things, as though Lex had done something _right_.

Lex had to force down a blush -- approval was **not** something he was used to receiving, from _anyone_. Approval, from Clark, for _breaking_ something… made him feel really rather odd.

“It’s fine,” Clark told him, taking the broken glass away from him with gentle hands and a gentle voice. He was still _smiling at him_ , of all things. “You know what you’re doing.”

“Clark, I just broke that glass,” Lex reminded him, feeling a little like he was going crazy, because hadn’t that just _proved_ that--?

“Yeah,” said Clark, as he moved past him to drop the glass in the trash can, and then carefully wiped his hands together, making sure he’d cleaned any stray bits of the glass off of him. “You did. On purpose, not by accident.”

“...Clark, it was too easy,” Lex said uneasily.

Clark turned towards him. “Lex, you weren’t even looking when you caught that glass, when I dropped it into your hands. You couldn’t see what you were doing, or what I was doing; you had your eyes closed.”

“You told me to close my eyes,” Lex said, feeling like he’d missed something important, especially when he saw the light start to come on for Mrs. Kent.

“Lex, _you can feel it_ ,” Clark told him. “I _can’t_.”

“You... _what?_ ” Lex said, dumbfounded.

“Do you know what the easiest way is to break a glass?” Clark said, apropos of none. Lex shook his head, because he could think of several ways to do so, generally involving dropping or throwing such items, but nothing he would consider ‘easy’.

That wasn’t what Clark did, though. He pantomimed cupping the glass as Lex had...

And then he **CLAPPED** his hands together.

Lex startled. He stared.

“That’s not--” and then Lex frowned and cut himself off. The idea of that was **disturbing** for some reason, but with Clark’s powers, that likely _would_ be the most efficient way to do it. Except... “Clark, that would _shatter_ the glass,” Lex told him. “You’d spray glass shards literally everywhere, in every direction,” he pointed out.

Clark nodded at him in agreement. “I’ve always had to be really careful when I hold things,” he told Lex. “How I position myself...”

And when Lex finally got it, he reflexively sucked in a breath and straightened.

Clark nodded again. “I’ve had to practice a _lot_ , to not do that. Every time I’ve had a growth spurt and gotten stronger. Every time I’ve had a growth spurt and gotten _taller_ ,” he told Lex. “I’ve gotten used to being afraid to touch things, not because I could burn myself if something’s too hot -- because I can’t-- _couldn't_ \-- but because I could tear it apart without even realizing it,” Clark told him. “Because it’s _never_ gotten any easier. I’ve always had to think about every movement of every muscle, every little tick and twist and jerk and twitch of motion, every time I move, every time anyone _around_ me moves,” and Lex heard a soft gasp of breath from Mrs. Kent and realized that it hadn’t just been the effect of the meteor rock Clark hadn’t fully disclosed to her -- Clark must not have ever explained the extent of this to her, either. Not until now.

“You don’t have to anymore,” Lex said slowly, and Clark smiled.

“No,” Clark said. “I can actually feel stuff now.” He laughed. “I can even feel tired!” He sounded amazed, happy, -- _relieved_. At having limits.

‘Oh, Clark,’ Lex thought, and he stepped forward and gathered his friend up in a hug.

Clark hugged him back -- _squeezed_ him, on purpose -- as hard as he could.

Lex let out a startled breath, then smiled softly, closed his eyes and squeezed Clark gently back, because what must it have been like for him to hug someone and not actually be able to _feel_ it? The warmth of it? The pressure?

Lex felt the huff of breath out and the half-laugh, and he didn’t have to see Clark’s grin to know it was there.

Lex took a breath in, and he let that breath out again. He stood there for awhile, just holding Clark close.

“You’re warm,” Clark said quietly.

“So are you,” Lex murmured back, because he was. Always had been, but...

Clark let out another soft laugh.

Lex slowly relaxed into his embrace. This was… nice. He sighed out, softly.

He heard footsteps and what sounded like the creaking of stairs, and he stifled a grimace and a very different sort of sigh as he opened his eyes and slowly pulled away from Clark.

Not _too_ far away from Clark’s warmth, though.

He tried not to tense as Mr. Kent made his way into the living room, and walked his way back to the kitchen.

Clark did, though. But Lex’s friend didn’t seem to have any qualms at all about also straightening in place and telling Jonathan Kent, “You can’t make me do it.”

Lex blinked up at Clark, and it took him a moment.

“Clark--” his father began.

\--And it probably would’ve taken Lex far longer than a moment if Clark hadn’t cut off his father immediately and belligerently, with: “Lex is doing just fine with them! You can’t make me take them back!”

Lex stared up at Clark.

There was dead silence in the room while he did so.

Then Clark seemed to wince a little and twisted his head down quickly to look at Lex.

“--I mean, you-- you’re okay with keeping them, right?” Clark asked him, a little wide-eyed. He seemed almost nervous. ...He also sounded almost painfully hopeful at the idea.

It was, perhaps, a bit of an understatement to say that, in response to Clark’s rather unexpected question, Lex’s mind went a little blank.

Lex swallowed hard, unable to think of anything to do or say, and was saved from having to answer the actual question as-posed when he heard Mrs. Kent clear her throat, and felt a gentle hand on his shoulder.

“Why don’t we all talk about it after dinner?” Mrs. Kent said reasonably, as she steered Lex towards the table and not-quite-shoved him down into a chair.

Lex began breathing again.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Later that evening, in the barn loft, Lex lay down on Clark’s couch, and reminded himself, again, that he needed to continue breathing.

Breathing was important.

He closed his eyes.

Heard footsteps.

Familiar ones, coming up the stairs to the loft.

Lex breathed, and he waited until they stopped.

"--I'm sorry that my parents kidnapped you," Clark said all in a rush. "Are... are you mad?"

Lex opened his eyes to the ceiling, then turned his head to stare at his young powerless friend, as Clark stood there and shifted in place anxiously.

“...No, Clark,” Lex said to him, finally. “I’m not mad.”

And he wasn’t. He wasn’t mad.

He remembered to breathe.

Clark, and his family, were all completely insane.

Breathing was important.

“Are you okay?” Clark asked him.

Lex laughed.

~*~*~*~*~*~


End file.
